Details: Minifig sculptures are an interesting genre - you can build them at so many different scales, and with so many different techniques, but it still seems like most people just copy set 3723. Increasingly, the official sculptures that LEGO uses for promotional purposes seem to be getting increasingly cartoony, with dimensions and angles that look less like actual LEGO pieces and more like something out of a LEGO-branded video game. It's an interesting aesthetic that I suspect we'll see leaking into fan-created builds over time, but so far seems to be used primarily by professionals.
One advantage of Ryan McNaught's status as a LEGO Certified Professional in Australia is that his model shop is LEGO's preferred method of making official promotional sculptures in Australia (this doesn't happen in most of the world, but it's an advantage of being on a continent without other model shops or certified professionals). Because of this, official designs for sculpted large minifigures have been trickling out on Ryan's Flickr photostream for some time now. They're not all necessarily built or designed by Ryan, but they're all built in his studio. You can see a few more characters under his legominifig tag and legocity tag, or, say, in anyofthesephotos. There aren't too many photos of any particular model, but the models themselves are nice, with appropriate details and sculptural technique. It's worth taking a look and browsing through his photostream.
Details: This might seem a little quick and simple, but I like it. These use the older minifig-holding magnets (from when LEGO sold minifigure magnet sets where the minifigure was not glued to the magnet), and use tiles and minifigures to indicate different locations - specifically, places that Bret might be when he's not at his desk. It's a good excuse to bring some LEGO into a decidedly non-LEGO environment, and we never have enough good reasons to do that. It's different. It's clever. It's practical. It's functional. It's something I wish I had thought of first.
Details: I'll keep this short since this is already fairly well-explained at the links above. The basic concept was to make a callback to the classic winter catalog covers that featured LEGO characters from various themes giving gifts to each other at some sort of holiday gathering. Here, the idea is kicked up a notch with collectible minifigures (not to mention Max!) and a gingerbread house.
Expand your very own wizarding world of Harry Potter™!
No need to pass through the Leaky Cauldron. Now even Muggles can shop in Diagon Alley by building this fantastically magical set that includes 3 extensively detailed buildings and 11 minifigures! Join Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger as they shop for their Hogwarts school supplies. Visit Ollivanders, Borgin and Burkes, and Gringotts Bank. Each Diagon Alley building is realistically detailed. Ollivanders offers an extensive selection of wands, storage shelves and a step ladder that allows Ollivander to gather wands from the top floor. The front desk has an “exploding” function for those inconvenient times when a spell goes awry. Borgin and Burkes includes a scary skeleton, “glow-in-the-dark” elements, a fireplace attached to the Floo Network and a Vanishing Cabinet that Dark wizards might use to sneak into Hogwarts. Gringotts Bank is an impressive two-story building with large double doors, and can be opened completely into one large building or closed to create one smaller building. The bank’s interior features a removable vault, along with the Philosopher’s Stone, a clerk’s desk, a chandelier and ‘wonky’ support pillars. Includes 11 minifigures: Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, each with magic wand; Rubeus Hagrid, equipped with his pink umbrella; Fred and George Weasley; 2 Gringotts goblins; Mr. Ollivander; Lucius Malfoy (with Death Eater disguise); Fenrir Greyback; and 4 new, decorated owls.
Includes 11 minifigures: Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, each with magic wand; Rubeus Hagrid, equipped with his pink umbrella; Fred and George Weasley; 2 Gringotts goblins; Mr. Ollivander; Lucius Malfoy (with Death Eater disguise); Fenrir Greyback; and 4 new, decorated owls!
Diagon Alley is made up of 3 extensively detailed buildings: Ollivanders, Borgin and Burkes and Gringotts Bank!
Ollivanders features lots of wands, storage shelves and a step ladder that leads to the top floor!
Front desk at Ollivanders has an “exploding” function!
Borgin and Burkes includes a skeleton, “glow-in-the-dark” elements, fireplace attached to the Floo Network and even a Vanishing Cabinet!
Gringotts Bank is a two-story building featuring large double doors!
Open Gringotts Bank completely into one large building and explore inside or close it to create a smaller building!
Gringotts Bank features a detailed interior with a removable vault, the Philosopher’s Stone, clerk’s desk, chandelier and ‘wonky’ support pillars!
Includes 11 minifigures: Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, each with magic wand; Rubeus Hagrid, equipped with his pink umbrella; Fred and George Weasley; 2 Gringotts goblins; Mr. Ollivander; Lucius Malfoy (with Death Eater disguise); Fenrir Greyback; and 4 new, decorated owls!
Additionally, there's an official set of photos that was released to a few of the larger fan sites - this set seems to include a few (including minifig close-ups) that are not on the official page for this set.
Details: We've all had days where we've wanted to shish-kabob people, sell them to a shark, run them through a LEGO rotisserie cooker, and feed them to rock monsters, right? Right? Here's a model to cheer you up on those days. A light, minifig-scale spoof of a street-side food vendor, this is actually geared so that the heads spin (and cook evenly) when a hand crank is used (there's video!)
Of course, what really sells it is the terrified minifig facial expressions. Well, that, the fire in front of the line of excited rock monsters, and the spectacular use of color. Magenta slopes look great on the frame, transparent pink flowers perfectly fill the spaces between heads, and translucent red bricks on the sides of the cooker give this the look of a proper grill.
Details: There aren't enough fruit sculptures in the world. Particularly of the giant variety. While I'm always a fan of small-ish sculptures, this one kicks it up a notch by being both small and super-sized - and then, for extra whimsy, the builder throws in a chef minifig attempting to put this giant berry on a plate.
Details: The Collectible Minifigures line has inspired a ton of goofiness, but surprisingly few decent large-scale scenes. Here's one fantastic scene, built around the Caveman minifigure from series 1. The landscaping is fantastic, with some unusual colors and textures - note the use of the new Prince of Persia arches (in the new color from that same line) to make trees, the careful placement of vines, and the use of lever bases on top of flower stems. The campsite is also a nice touch.
Details: Premiered at this year's Arte em Peças event, this gorgeous show-stopper is actually in scale with the Cafe Corner and ready for minifigures. It's not truly to the Cafe Corner standard, though, since the back is wide open. Of course, if the back wasn't open, we wouldn't be able to see the fantastic interior work. Highlights include leathery couches, mosaic floor patterns, a pair of grand spiral staircases, a variety of minifigures on display, detailed curtains built upside-down (in dark red!), and ornate window decorations on the outside. You'll need to use the "View All Sizes" feature on flickr to zoom in and see the original photo size in order to see some of the details.
Details: Plenty of exciting new items have shown up at LEGO Shop-at-Home recently. Among them are the new collectible minifigures. They're selling quickly (and with a limit of 5 per order), so if you want them you better hurry. If you're looking for an interesting way to display them, check out the links above - LEGO's "club" is offering complete instructions and parts lists to build a display podium (pictured here), a Ninja gate, a Skateboarder ramp, a saloon door for the Cowboy, and a stage for the Magician. Perfect vignettes for the minifigures!
Details: This beautiful minifig-scale castle makes good use of studs-not-on-top techniques to make it stand out (well, that, and a healthy amount of distinctive landscaping built with his daughter). A common complaint about large castle is the "big grey wall problem" - sometimes you end up with a rather large, plain surface that is impressive in scope but not terribly interesting in appearance. Here, we see both studs and tiles (inside of arches) facing outwards to add more texture to the walls and break up the big bluish grey ("bley") walls.
Details: The manager of the LEGO Brand Retail store in Chandler, Arizona, USA recently built this minifigure scale version of the store. It includes custom minifigs (made with decals) for each of the employees. Although the store shelves aren't filled in in much detail, the various kiosk shelves and the Pick-a-Brick wall do a very good job of making this match the iconic LEGO store look. All of the LEGO Brand Retail stores (in the US) are fairly standardized, so this should look pretty familiar to you if you've been to any LEGO Store.
Details: Remember a few weeks back when I featured OK GO's Rube Goldberg Contraption? How about a few months before that when I mentioned Tora no Maki? Imagine combining the weight-powered mechanisms from Tora no Maki with a grand Rube Goldberg Machine in the style of OK GO's but less dramatic and entirely made out of LEGO. That's what this machine is like. In this video, though, you really get a chance to see what's what - after you see the machine run through once, you get to see outtakes edited in order of where they failed. The repeated close-ups on each section make it nice and clear what's going on in each part. Personally, I'm really impressed that no electricity was used - everything is triggered by weight. Another victory for the non-motorized mechanical world!
Details: Although LEGO has done a good job with their new official games line (NEW from LEGO® Shop LEGO Games. Play a new way.), they've avoided getting too close to existing games. Sure, some are slightly similar (Monster 4 is loosely based on Tic-Tac-Toe but much more fun, and Pirate Code bears some similarity to Mastermind), but I suspect that the licensing costs weren't worth it to do LEGO boards for established popular games (for the record, I'd be rooting for a LEGO travel scrabble and a LEGO Monopoly city). Today's featured model is an adaptation of the game Snakes and Ladders (also known as Chute and Ladders). Indiana Jones (famous for the line "I hate snakes!") is a natural choice for a character and thematic background. This version of the game allows for up to 6 players (3 of them can be Indiana Jones). Tiles make for great game spaces, and even work well with a bridge over water. As clever as the little snakes and ladders are, I think the real reason to recast this game in a LEGO format is the ability to add real landscaping. Now the ladders actually help you (technically your minifig) climb things and the snakes can really make Indy say "I hate snakes!"
A word of warning - today's post is a bit of a stretch (it's only marginally LEGO-related) and some of the sites linked to from this post feature mild language. For obvious reasons, I can't control the level of insanity we see in comments on other sites. My choice of "making of" link is one of several, and some of the others contain some language that I try not to link to.
...but really, that's not what warrants a "don't try this at home". Read on to be inspired.
For today, here's something completely different - a large Rube Goldberg Machine that features a LEGO section. Later on in this video, we get to see a large racecar used as part of the contraption (in case this isn't clear - kids, DO NOT try this one at home. I cannot be held responsible for any smashed televisions, splatter-painted walls, messy warehouses, or other shenanigans inspired by this video). The LEGO portion of the machine features a Technic model of the racecar that appears later on. The car is triggered by a Power Functions-based launcher that is triggered by something flying across the room. Similarly, when the car is finished moving across the table with the LEGO section on it, it triggers the next mechanism by way of a flying rope - and then the next part of the machine actually plays part of the song. The LEGO whimsy here isn't strictly functional, though - in the picture below you can see the "concert" dome, where a colorful assortment of minifigures is watching a band perform. Not far behind that is a mosaic of the band's name (oh, did I mention this was a music video? The band wisely lets the machine steal the show).
The machine was created for the band OK GO (yes, of treadmill dancing fame, and yes, I know there's already a LEGO knockoff of that video). The machine was created by Synn Labs. Wired.com has a fairly thorough description of the process, although the nature of a project this large is that there are quite a few people out there who were involved in building the machine and are discussing it in various venues. I'm yet to see anything specific about the LEGO portion, but let's face it - this is just spectacular overall.
I've featured my fair share of Castles (and even other entries from previous Colossal Castle Contests), but I barely touch most of the excellent castles out there. The latest Colossal Castle Contest brought some of the best castles I've seen yet. The categories are listed on that website, along with builders' credits and links to additional photos. This would easily be over a week's worth of "of the day" models here, but in the interest of not just establishing a backlog of phenomenal medieval creations, I'm featuring the winners as a group for today's Sunday edition.
Details: This one photo is the only one of this model. At first glance, this model looks like a simple but effective use of the still fairly scarce "kid legs" element. After all, it's just a teacher and two schoolchildren, right? Then you might notice some of the clever scale games - 2x2 tiles turn into books on a shelf, and a few microscale "toys" can be found in the room. Maybe the toy kitchen (perfectly scaled, of course) sticks out. Then you start to notice that nothing is really attached to the tiled floor. The desk and shelves are cleverly built sideways (upside-down in one case, but I can't tell you how clever it is until I figure out just how that was done), and even the toy kitchen is just sitting there. A close look at the boy in the chair reveals the chair's surprising construction and a trick where the kid actually has legs sitting separately in front of his body to make it look like he is sitting down. Perhaps more of a masterpiece of photography than a truly masterful LEGO model (for all its details, can you imagine this thing not falling apart at the slightest bump because of all the loose parts in it?), this is truly an excellent example of what you can do by carefully posing characters and appropriately scaled objects in a LEGO model. Just don't invite kids, pets, or anyone curious about that shelf into the room.
Details: This is a very small (just 5 studs wide) version of the Delorean from the Back to the Future movies. It's a little out of scale for the minifigure in the photo (I'm afraid there's only the one image for this one - but you can make it bigger!), but still an excellent rendition. Notable techniques include string for wheel wells, elastics for the trim near the ground, levers and nozzle/gun elements for window edges, and a ridiculous amount of studs-not-on-top stunts. At this scale, it's even possible to use sideways "cheese grater" 1x2 slopes as seats!
Details: While the sleigh isn't visible in this model (based on the title, I think we're supposed to assume it has been stolen), this is an interesting new twist on the traditional "Santa's workshop" theme. The "elves" here are a fairly clever mix of parts - those torsos are from 1980's Forestman sets, the legs have only started showing up in sets these past few years, and the little hats are from the 2009 Venice Canal Chase kit (which, by the way, appears to be on a promotional offer at Amazon at the moment - that set has a generous amount of parts for $40, so at $34 it's a pretty great deal). While the elves and gifts make the scene, the interior lighting is what makes this piece a winner - check out the photos of this workshop in the dark. Another detail with looking out for is the door behind the elves - notice how it has been built out of bricks. That rounded section at the top is actually made from this curved arch brick, which has some space underneath. The space was filled with plates and tiles to get this effect - which is a tight enough fit to hold the other plates and tiles in straight.
EDIT 9:17 PM: Word from the builder is that the door technique was borrowed from a similar door built by Noddy.
Details: If you've been reading for a while, then you know I'm a huge fan of large sculptures of minifigs (increasingly, the term "maxifig" is being used to describe these). Here's one that should appeal to the Star Wars fans out there - an Episode 3 "Shock Trooper" (this is in comparison to the last "maxifig" I blogged, which was decidedly for fans of classic Space themes instead). Sure, it was already an impressive feat that the helmet was rendered here in perfect detail - but in order to be truly spectacular, other surprise features had to be added - glowing lights in the eyes, a removable chest panel (unlocked by a clever lock mechanism), and a hatch which dispenses stormtrooper minifigures (starting the dispenser feature requires sticking the "key" into a spot on the side of the maxifig, conveniently hidden by an arm most of the time).
Details: XKCD has recently made some waves in the LEGO fan community due to a comic strip that uses LEGO as a metaphor. While the XKCD webcomic can be a bit racier than most of the things I link to here, I personally find it to be brilliant. Unlike most of the people just discovering it, I'm well aware that there are also extra punchlines hidden in the title attribute (that's my polite way of saying that if you saw that strip on another LEGO blog, you've not read the entire comic). You should be able to hold your cursor over the image to make the title appear - you can try it out on the images below in this post.
Although that one strip has been getting all of the attention, there are a few other classic XKCD comic strips that have actually been rendered into LEGO form, one of which is today's model of the day. Here's the minifig version of #562, "Parking":
I was all set to go with posting this as Tuesday's model of the day, but since it's only two clicks from this post to something I figure most people don't want their kids to see, I've decided to bury it a little by running it for the weekend. Consider Doyle's strip to be Saturday's LMOTD and the one featured more prominently above to be Sunday's. Oh, and if you are reading this and under the age of 18, just skip the more provocative comics and instead try to teach yourself perl, because the man making the comics is completely right.
Minifig sculptures are an interesting genre - you can build them at so many different scales, and with so many different techniques, but it still seems like most people just copy set 3723. Increasingly, the official sculptures that LEGO uses for promotional purposes seem to be getting increasingly cartoony, with dimensions and angles that look less like actual LEGO pieces and more like something out of a LEGO-branded video game. It's an interesting aesthetic that I suspect we'll see leaking into fan-created builds over time, but so far seems to be used primarily by professionals.
), they've avoided getting too close to existing games. Sure, some are slightly similar (Monster 4 is loosely based on Tic-Tac-Toe but much more fun, and Pirate Code bears some similarity to 
), but I suspect that the licensing costs weren't worth it to do LEGO boards for established popular games (for the record, I'd be rooting for a LEGO travel scrabble and a LEGO Monopoly city). Today's featured model is an adaptation of the game 
(also known as 
). Indiana Jones (famous for the line "I hate snakes!") is a natural choice for a character and thematic background. This version of the game allows for up to 6 players (3 of them can be Indiana Jones). Tiles make for great game spaces, and even work well with a bridge over water. As clever as the little snakes and ladders are, I think the real reason to recast this game in a LEGO format is the ability to add real landscaping. Now the ladders actually help you (technically your minifig) climb things and the snakes can really make Indy say "I hate snakes!"
(yes, of 
movies. It's a little out of scale for the minifigure in the photo (I'm afraid there's only the one image for this one - but you can make it 
at the moment - that set has a generous amount of parts for $40, so at $34 it's a pretty great deal). While the elves and gifts make the scene, the interior lighting is what makes this piece a winner - check out the photos of this workshop in the dark. Another detail with looking out for is the 
